Lovetreats Announces Content Partnership

Posted on Oct 10, 2016

Lovetreats & MakeLoveNotPornTeam-up to Talk About Sex

Lovetreats, one of India’s classiest sexual health & wellness e-tailers, has always aimed to inspire people to engage in sex and self-love without fear of judgement. In light of this, we are excited to announce our content partnership with MakeLoveNotPorn (MLNP), the brainchild of Cindy Gallop, to open up healthy dialogue about sex in the real world and to fuel a conversation where there wasn’t one before.

MLNP is a platform which tackles the myths created by pornography by driving engagement and discussion about sex in the real world. Their message is clear, “Talk about sex – openly and publicly, and privately and intimately with your partner. Great sex is born out of great communication – all round.”

In our content partnership, Lovetreats will co-publish blogs, features, and opinion pieces especially tailored for the Indian audience. Be it due to a lack of sex ed or the fact that Indians are still too shy to talk about sex, when it comes to sexual expression and awareness, we still have a long way to go. We hope that this partnership will help bridge that gap and get Indians talking about sex openly and view it in a positive light.

So where did it all start?

Ute, co-founder, Lovetreats was already familiar with MLNP and the tremendous work they’d been doing. “I came across Cindy's TED talk a few years back and was really impressed by it,” she says. “Even though we actually had good sex ed in my school, I realised that nobody ever talked about pleasure or satisfaction when it came to sex.”

Cindy heard about Lovetreats when TechInAsia ran this story in April. “I tweeted it extensively, tagging Lovetreats, and we began a Twitter dialogue during which I mentioned that I would be in Delhi in May to speak at the MTV India Youth Marketing Forum, and Ute said she would very kindly come to Delhi to meet with me.”

“[Over lunch in Delhi] It was clear that both Lovetreats and MLNP shared the same vision of normalizing and socializing sex, taking the shame and embarrassment out of it in order to make it easier to talk about and therefore easier to enjoy as it should be enjoyed - openly, healthily and honestly, practising great sexual values,” says Cindy. “Ute said over lunch how much she and the Lovetreats team loved what MLNP is doing, and how much they'd love to see MLNP take off in India, given how badly India needs us. I was blown away when Ute wrote to me following our lunch to propose a partnership.”

“When Cindy and I met in Delhi,” continues Ute, “we talked about the kind of questions we get from our Indian users, and agreed that there was a lack of quality content around sex, sexuality, pleasure and the difference between porn and real world sex available to the Indian audience. A partnership in which we could both contribute to providing localised content for India seemed like the next logical step.”

Cindy adds: “We also decided to partner with Lovetreats because India is crying out for MLNP. India is regularly one of our highest sources of traffic (driven by searches for 'porn' which send Indians to us, and by occasional media coverage). Indians write to us asking us to launch MLNP India. I received this wonderful email just last week:

Hey Cindy,

I am a 26 years old Indian woman and I love your idea.

I come from a very conservative society, but from the generation that likes to experiment (I am confident that my generation will take to your idea). I want to know if I can help/contribute in anyway... make sex an okay topic to discuss in India..Let us change my country through sex!!

“We see some very exciting business opportunities inherent in our Lovetreats/MLNP partnership, which I can't say too much about just yet. What I can say is that I am so impressed with the much-needed help and advice Lovetreats provides to an Indian audience desperate for information about sex.

“I regularly ask people, ‘What are your sexual values?’ and no one can ever answer that question, because we’re not brought up to think that way. Many of us, if we’re fortunate, are born into families and environments where our parents bring us up to have good manners, a work ethic, a sense of responsibility, accountability. Nobody ever brings us up to behave well in bed. They should – because empathy, sensitivity, generosity, kindness are as important there, as they are in every other area of our lives and work where we are actively taught to exercise those values.

Ute concurs, “Our businesses have great synergies, and I hope that this content partnership is just the beginning. I think Cindy and her team can really help us in breaking the ice when it comes to talking about sex, and demystifying the whole topic by openly talking about taboos. I could also see us working together on multimedia projects around sex, pleasure and pleasure products in the future.”